Spot the Joyce fan

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Bibliophiles are having fun with the bookish references in the Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy movies Before Sunrise and its sequel Before Sunset.

In the first, the couple met on a train (she carrying a book by postmodernist Georges Bataille) and spent 14 hours walking around Vienna. They parted at dawn on June 16, or Bloomsday - the date of both James Joyce's first date with his future wife, Nora, and of Leopold Bloom's day-long walk around Dublin in Ulysses.

Before Sunrise was also the title of a Gerhart Hauptmann play translated by Joyce.

In the new movie, Hawke and Delpy meet nine years later, this time in Paris. Hawke's character has written a novel about their romantic encounter and discusses it with journalists at Shakespeare & Co, the bookshop founded by Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses.

In real life, Hawke is also the author of two novels about tortured young love, The Hottest State (with a night in a Paris hotel) and Ash Wednesday. What does all this mean?

Perhaps there are clues to the unresolved on-screen relationship (will they marry like Joyce and Nora, Bloom and Molly?). Or perhaps it is literary nonsense. Nonetheless, the movies are intelligent and charming.